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Book of Colossians 3:8-11 Ye Have Put Off the Old Man
[Study Aired October 27, 2026]
“But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:8–11).
But Now Ye Also Put Off
The last study ended on a past tense. The Colossians once walked in the sins that God’s wrath comes for. Verse 8 begins with “But now,” and the sentence turns from what they were to what they do. These four verses move in four steps: a command with a list, the reason for it, a new man put on, and a place where the old dividing lines do not count.
“Put off” is the language of clothing. Paul tells them to take these things off like a garment they no longer wear. His “ye also” answers verse 7, where he said “ye also walked” in them. They walked in these things, and now they take them off. “All these” takes in at least the five names that follow. Whether it also reaches back to the list in verse 5, the verse does not say. One warning about the English: the KJV says “put off” in verse 8 (G659) and “put off” again in verse 9 (G554). Those are two different Greek words, and verse 9 is the one we will study.
The list has five names. Three name what is in a man, and two name what he says.
The first name is a word we have already met. “Anger” is orgē (G3709), and two verses back the KJV printed the same word as “the wrath (G3709) of God cometh” (Colossians 3:6). So the KJV hides a link. It prints one Greek word as “wrath” in verse 6 and as “anger” in verse 8, and then prints a different word (G2372) as “wrath” right after it. The English echo is false, and the Greek echo is hidden.
This does not mean that every anger is sin. The Lord “looked round about on them with anger (G3709)” (Mark 3:5), and Paul says, “Be ye angry (G3710), and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath (G3950)” (Ephesians 4:26). But Ephesians 4:31 puts this same word among the things “put away” with no exception, and James says, “the wrath (G3709) of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). So the word is used of Christ and of men. The company of the list shapes the sense here, and Scripture gives man’s wrath no credit. That does not set God’s wrath beside man’s. What the letter says wrongdoing receives waits at Colossians 3:25.
Paul wrote Ephesus a list like this one: “Let all bitterness, and wrath (G2372), and anger (G3709), and clamour, and evil speaking (G988), be put away from you, with all malice” (Ephesians 4:31). Four of our five names stand there. The very next verse sets kindness against the list: “be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another” (Ephesians 4:32). So in Ephesians, at least, the list is about how people treat one another.
The next name can mislead an English reader. Today “blasphemy” means speaking against God. The Greek word is blasphēmia (G988), and it means abusive speech. The word does not fix who the abuse is aimed at, and the New Testament uses it both ways. It is aimed at God in “he opened his mouth in blasphemy (G988) against God” (Revelation 13:6), and at the spirit in “the blasphemy (G988) against the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 12:31). But it is aimed at men in Ephesians 4:31, where the KJV prints this same word as “evil speaking (G988),” and in 1 Timothy 6:4, where it stands among “envy, strife, railings (G988), evil surmisings.” Jude 9 uses it of what even Michael would not bring against the devil, “a railing accusation (G988).” So the word covers abuse of anyone.
In our verse it sits between malice and filthy talk, in a list that Ephesians sets against kindness to one another, and Ephesians 4:31 gives it the same company. So here it most naturally means abusive speech against people. The verse does not name a target, and the word could reach God as well. The company it keeps points to men.
The last name is “filthy communication (G148).” In 1611 “communication” meant talk: “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth” (Ephesians 4:29), and “Evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Corinthians 15:33). The Greek word is aischrologia (G148), and it stands nowhere else in the New Testament. With no other verse to compare, its sense has to come from outside it, and the reference works divide: Thayer’s lexicon gives “foul speaking, low and obscene speech,” and the NAS Exhaustive Concordance gives “abusive language.” Both fit “out of your mouth.” What we can say with confidence is that it is foul or abusive speech coming from the mouth.
The last two names have the mouth in view, and the Lord says where the mouth gets what it speaks. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matthew 12:34), and again, “those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart” (Matthew 15:18). So these are sins of the heart, as the list in verse 5 was. Here they are spoken aloud. In plain terms, verse 8 tells them to take off anger, wrath, and malice, and the abusive or foul talk that comes out of the mouth.
The Old Man With His Deeds
Verse 9 adds one more sin of the mouth, and then gives a reason. Take the sin first: “Lie not one to another.” The words are plain. Ephesians gives the same command and the reason for it between believers: “putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members (G3196) one of another” (Ephesians 4:25). Verse 5 spoke of “your members (G3196),” and here is the same word in another use. The members belong to each other, so a lie told to one is told to a member of one’s own body. Proverbs says how the Lord sees it: “Lying lips are abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 12:22). The verse forbids lying.
Now the reason: “seeing that ye have put off (G554) the old man with his deeds.” Begin with what the old man is. Paul uses the phrase in two other places. In Romans: “our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed” (Romans 6:6). In Ephesians: “put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts” (Ephesians 4:22). Put together, these say that the old man is the former self, corrupt in its lusts, and that it was crucified with Christ. His “deeds” are the kind of thing Paul has just listed.
Romans 6:6 sets the old man and “the body of sin” in one sentence, and earlier in this letter Paul wrote of “putting off (G555) the body of the sins of the flesh” (Colossians 2:11). Paul does not say these are one thing. He does say that both are dealt with in Christ.
Ephesians gives the old man’s putting off as a command (4:22), and Colossians gives it as a deed done. Romans gives it both ways: “our old man is crucified with him” (Romans 6:6), and then “reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin” (Romans 6:11). So the one truth is stated as done and as something to live out.
The word for “put off” here is apekduomai (G554). It stands only twice in the New Testament, both times in this letter, here and at 2:15, and in both it is a stripping off. Its noun, the “putting off (G555)” of 2:11, stands once. An earlier study met the verb at 2:15, said the form would bear either of two meanings there, and pointed to this verse to show the word’s other use. Here at 3:9 it is plain who the subject is: the ones who put off are the ones who wore it. The old man is theirs, and the verse says they have put it off.
Who does the stripping? Two things Paul says can look as if they pull apart. At 2:11–12 the putting off is “by the circumcision of Christ,” and they were raised “through the faith of the operation of God.” In Romans the old man “is crucified with him.” Yet here the readers are the ones who have put off. Both are true, and Scripture gives the ground: they work because God works in them. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13). Paul says it of his own labor: “striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily” (Colossians 1:29). And the Lord says why: “without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). So the work is God’s, and they take part in it. They put off, and He works in them both to will and to do.
Part of what God works in them is the mind, because without it a man cannot do this. “To be carnally minded (G5427) is death; but to be spiritually minded (G5427) is life and peace” (Romans 8:6), and “the carnal mind (G5427) is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Romans 8:7). “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God… neither can he know them” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Paul uses another word for mind when he says of believers, “we have the mind (G3563) of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), and he says where it comes from: “we have received… the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God” (1 Corinthians 2:12). The mind is given and renewed, and the renewing is also commanded: “be ye transformed by the renewing (G342) of your mind (G3563)” (Romans 12:2). A command and a gift together is the pattern of these verses: a command to put off, and God working in the one commanded. The new man of verse 10 is the one in whom this goes on: he “is renewed (G341) in knowledge (G1922).” Then Paul tells the Philippians, “Let this mind (G5426) be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus,” the same verb (G5426) as “set your affection” at 3:2, and in the same paragraph as “it is God which worketh in you” (Philippians 2:5, 13). So the mind is not what they bring to the putting off. It is given, and it is part of what God works in them.
In plain terms: the old man is already put off, so the sins that belonged to him are to be put off too, and the One who has done it is the One who works in them to do it. The reason stands beside the command about lying, and it takes the old man’s deeds with him. Ephesians keeps the same order across the whole run: the old man put off (4:22), then “Wherefore putting away lying” (4:25), then “let all bitterness, and wrath (G2372), and anger (G3709)… be put away” (4:31). So the command stands on the deed.
The New Man, Renewed
Verse 10 does not stop at taking off: “And have put on (G1746) the new man.” The picture is clothing again. The old man comes off and the new man goes on. Ephesians 4:22–24 sets the two side by side the same way.
Then the new man “is renewed (G341).” The word is anakainoō (G341), and it means to make new. It stands only twice in the New Testament, here and in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed (G341) day by day.” With only two uses there is nothing to set against them. Both are present tense, so the renewing is going on; in 2 Corinthians, day by day. The form is the same whether a man is renewed by another or renews himself, so the form alone does not say who does the renewing.
Who renews him? Two passages put the working in the spirit. Titus 3:5 uses the related noun: “renewing (G342) of the Holy Ghost.” And 2 Corinthians 3:18, with a different verb (G3339), says we are “changed (G3339) into the same image (G1504) from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” So the renewing is the spirit’s work, and it is received.
Set the two tenses side by side. They “have put on (G1746)” the new man, which is stated as done. And he “is renewed (G341),” which goes on. The standing is stated first, and the renewing goes on in it.
He is renewed “in knowledge (G1922).” The word is epignōsis (G1922), the same word as at 1:9 and 1:10, where the KJV also says “knowledge (G1922).” This verse does not name what the knowledge is of, and the word alone cannot say. It can take other objects: “the knowledge (G1922) of sin” (Romans 3:20). So the object has to come from the letter, and every other use in the letter names it: “the knowledge (G1922) of his will” (1:9), “the knowledge (G1922) of God” (1:10), and “the acknowledgement (G1922) of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ” (2:2). Ephesians has it in the same chapter where it speaks of the new man: “the knowledge (G1922) of the Son of God” (Ephesians 4:13). So the knowledge in verse 10 is most naturally the knowledge of God, the same knowing this letter has prayed for.
The standard is “the image of him that created him.” “Image” is eikōn (G1504), a likeness that shows what it copies. An earlier study found it at 1:15, where Christ “is the image (G1504) of the invisible God.” Two passages say believers are being brought to it: “conformed to the image (G1504) of his Son” (Romans 8:29), and “changed (G3339) into the same image (G1504)” (2 Corinthians 3:18). So the new man is renewed after the image that Christ is.
Scripture also speaks of putting on Christ himself, with the same verb for “put on” (G1746) that verse 10 uses. “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on (G1746) Christ” (Galatians 3:27), and “put ye on (G1746) the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Romans 13:14). So the new man and Christ are both said to be put on. What joins them is not in these two verses.
The joining begins with a death. “Our old man is crucified with him” (Romans 6:6), so what dies in the believer dies in the same event as Christ’s cross. Paul says it of himself: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). And the joining goes on to a rising. These people were told, “ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God” (Colossians 2:12), and “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above” (Colossians 3:1). Ephesians says the same of believers: God “hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6). So the old man dies with Christ, and the new man is put on by those who have risen with Him. That is what joins them: one death and one rising.
There is a further reading, drawn from Scripture as a whole. God sent His Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” and “condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8:3). He “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21), and was “tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). He was “put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit” (1 Peter 3:18), and “in that he died, he died unto sin once” (Romans 6:10). The writer of Hebrews says He “took part of the same” flesh and blood as the children (Hebrews 2:14), and was “made like unto his brethren” in all things (Hebrews 2:17). And of our flesh Paul says, “in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing” (Romans 7:18), and that with the flesh he serves “the law of sin” (Romans 7:25). Taken together, these passages say more than any one of them states: the flesh He came in was the flesh sin works in, and He put it off in His death. Paul’s “putting off (G555) the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11) fits that reading. If it is right, the old man’s crucifixion with Him is not a death foreign to His own flesh: both ended at one cross.
Where There Is Neither Greek nor Jew
Verse 11 says what the new man looks like from the outside: it has no classes. The verse begins with “where,” and it points back to the new man in verse 10. In him these lines do not count.
Paul names four sets, and they are lines men draw sharply. Greek and Jew are nation and religion. Circumcision and uncircumcision are the mark that set Israel apart, and its lack. “Barbarian” was the name for a man whose speech you do not understand: “if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian” (1 Corinthians 14:11). “Scythian” stands only here in the New Testament. It names a people of the open grasslands north of the Black Sea. Thayer’s lexicon says the more civilized nations of antiquity counted them the wildest of barbarians. The verse does not say why Paul names them, but the line he draws is the lowest the world could draw, and in the new man it does not count. Bond and free are slave and not slave.
These are the lines the flesh draws. Paul says the Gentiles were “in the flesh,” and that circumcision was “in the flesh made by hands” (Ephesians 2:11). He counts his own circumcision and descent as “confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:3–5), and says, “henceforth know we no man after the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16). In the new man, those lines are gone.
Paul draws the same line in other letters. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free… for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28), and “by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free” (1 Corinthians 12:13). Circumcision has a witness of its own, since the letter has already dealt with it. At 2:11 Paul told these people that they were “circumcised with the circumcision made without hands.” And in Galatians: “in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature” (Galatians 6:15).
Bond and free is easy to over-read. The verse says the line between them does not count in the new man. It does not say the two places are gone. At 3:22 and 4:1 the letter still speaks to servants and to masters, and tells each what is owed in the Lord. Those verses will say what that is.
Colossians 3:22 “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God.”
Colossians 4:1 “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.”
Verse 11 ends, “But Christ is all, and in all.” That is the answer to every line just named. Where the world sorts men, the new man counts Christ for everything. “In all” is read here through the list just before it: in the new man, Christ is in the Greek and the Jew, the Barbarian and the Scythian, the slave and the free. Paul has said it of Gentiles: “among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). And he says it of himself, “an Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5): “Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20).
What These Verses Establish
Read whole, the four verses give a command, a reason, a new man, and a place. The command is to take off anger, wrath, and malice, the abusive or foul talk, and the lie told to a brother. The reason is that the old man, with all his deeds, has already been put off. What has been put on is the new man, who is joined to Christ in one death and one rising, and who is being renewed by the spirit after the image of God’s Son. And in that man the lines of nation, rite, culture, and station do not count, because Christ is all, and in every kind of man named.
What these verses add is where the command gets its strength. Paul tells them to put off, and in the next verse says that the old man has been put off. Romans says how: it was crucified with Christ. The new man is renewed, and Scripture says the spirit does the renewing. So the command does not ask them to make the new man. It asks them to live as the man already put on.
The new man has been put on, and Paul goes on to say what he wears. Verse 12 begins “Put on therefore,” and it names the clothing: bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering. That waits for the next study.
Next study: (Colossians 3:12–14)
“Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.”